Subject
Re: was Two from SKB; renamed VN'S Scots Sources
From
Date
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TOM (sorry I called you Tim; I have a faulty keyboard!):
Tomorrow¹s TLS (marked Jan 16 2009 but delivoured the day!) carries a review
by Joe Phelan o¹ Robert Crawford¹s ³THE BARD Robert Burns, a biography.
(Cape, 20 pund)² Seems destined to upset the ³Scottish Heritage Industry!²
But whit¹s noo? Discussing the bizarre mix of Kirk sermonizing, heavy
drinking and lusty couplings, there¹s a quote from Burns¹s famous ³The Holy
Fair²:
How monie hearts this day converts
O¹ sinners and o¹ Lasses!
Their hearts o¹ stane, gin night are gane,
As saft as any flesh is.
There¹s some are fou¹ o¹ brandy,
An¹ monie jobs that day begin,
May end in HOUGHMAGANDIE,
Some ither day.
³18th-century Scots was clearly a language rich in synonyms for the last
pastime*, and Burns makes use of most of them in his poetry.² (Joe Phelan,
TLS, ibid)
* I.e., houghmagandie as fornication. An old joke sees COMING THROUGH THE
RYE as a euphemism for shagging in a corn field.
This and similar poems were surely known to many ³down south² including VN¹s
Cambridge literary circles? Hadrian¹s Wall had lang syne crumbled! Among the
most popular tourist trinkets sold on Princes Street are tea towels
embroidered with Scots word lists and mottoes, where it¹s hard to separate
wheat from chaff: genuine ³reeking lums² and ³nicky tams² from the Harry
Lauder oots-mon stage excesses of ³it¹s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the
nicht!² In other words, we need not confine VN¹s sources of Lowlands dialect
to his Scots tutor. In particular, one wonders if VN was a tad too wee a
bairn to learn ³houghmagandie² from tutor Burness?? BTW, Rabbie¹s father¹s
name is officially recorded as WILLIAM BURNES, a reminder to all listers NOT
to FASH (worry) theirselves over SPELLING, which is quite a MODERN snare and
distraction! (Burn being a stream, the toponym is hard to pin down as any
sign of blood kin. Compare the 20 or so Unrelated Shak[e]spe[a]re families
in 17th-century Warwickshire alone ;=))
Here are some of my NEW YEAR NABOKOVIAN RESOLUTIONS:
1. Re-read Pale Fire in the light of all the marvelously inventive
allusion-hunting from Matt, Brian, Dieter, Jansy, Priscilla et al.
And esp. Matt¹s helpful taxonomy of VN¹s allusions. AIM: decide if VN is a
greater poet than JS!
(My copy of Verses & Versions has just arrived from amazon.com. Using a US
credit-card, my bill was only $26.40 (NOT $40 as advertised) plus $7.98
postage to UK. Thanks to Stanislav Shvabrin for this money-saving tip.)
2. Re-review Priscilla Meyer¹s Grand Unified Theorem linking Lolita and
Onegin (Thesis: America & Russia) with Lolita and Pale Fire (Antithesis:
America & England) leading to the Hegelian Synthesis in Ada. ASK: does her
confusion over Angus and Hugh MacDiarmid dilute her conclusions &/or falsify
her methodology? Are we really supposed to gain insights into the evolutions
of European languages/literatures? Are we really expected to learn new
biographical facts about VN¹s linguistic/cultural odysseys?
Both suggestions seem counter to VN¹s opposition to the ³novel as vocational
text book.²
On 04/01/2009 22:06, "Nabokv-L" <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
>
>
> Subject:
> Re: [NABOKV-L] McDiarmid, Southey, etc.
> From:
> Stan Kelly <skb@bootle.biz> <mailto:skb@bootle.biz>
> Date:
> Thu, 1 Jan 2009 14:00:25 +0000
> To:
> Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> <mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
>
>
> But Tim, there's no lack of SCOTS OOT type dictionaries
> available for Sassenacks ootside Hibernia
> skb
>> On 30 Dec 2008, at 15:31, NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU>
>> <mailto:NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
>> Dear All,
>> As a native speaker of the so-called "Lallans", born in Ayrshire, may
>> I remind Nabokophiles that the young VN had a Scots tutor, Mr Burness.
>> He may have been related to Robert Burness (later Burns), the poet of my
>> native Mauchline, where great aunt Poosie and her husband Wullie Gibson
>> were the proprietors of Poosie Nansie's Howff, the setting of Burns's
>> Jolly Beggars Cantata. I speculate that Mr Burness (who turns up in
>> Pale Fire under another name) introduced the young VN to certain
>> Lowland Scots expressions. It is unlikely that VN would have
>> encountered such terms such as "houghmagandie" in Cambridge, Berlin,
>> Paris, Stanford, Wellesley or Cornell.
>>
>> Seasonally, lang may yer lum reek...
>>
>> Tom Rymour
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Tomorrow¹s TLS (marked Jan 16 2009 but delivoured the day!) carries a review
by Joe Phelan o¹ Robert Crawford¹s ³THE BARD Robert Burns, a biography.
(Cape, 20 pund)² Seems destined to upset the ³Scottish Heritage Industry!²
But whit¹s noo? Discussing the bizarre mix of Kirk sermonizing, heavy
drinking and lusty couplings, there¹s a quote from Burns¹s famous ³The Holy
Fair²:
How monie hearts this day converts
O¹ sinners and o¹ Lasses!
Their hearts o¹ stane, gin night are gane,
As saft as any flesh is.
There¹s some are fou¹ o¹ brandy,
An¹ monie jobs that day begin,
May end in HOUGHMAGANDIE,
Some ither day.
³18th-century Scots was clearly a language rich in synonyms for the last
pastime*, and Burns makes use of most of them in his poetry.² (Joe Phelan,
TLS, ibid)
* I.e., houghmagandie as fornication. An old joke sees COMING THROUGH THE
RYE as a euphemism for shagging in a corn field.
This and similar poems were surely known to many ³down south² including VN¹s
Cambridge literary circles? Hadrian¹s Wall had lang syne crumbled! Among the
most popular tourist trinkets sold on Princes Street are tea towels
embroidered with Scots word lists and mottoes, where it¹s hard to separate
wheat from chaff: genuine ³reeking lums² and ³nicky tams² from the Harry
Lauder oots-mon stage excesses of ³it¹s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht the
nicht!² In other words, we need not confine VN¹s sources of Lowlands dialect
to his Scots tutor. In particular, one wonders if VN was a tad too wee a
bairn to learn ³houghmagandie² from tutor Burness?? BTW, Rabbie¹s father¹s
name is officially recorded as WILLIAM BURNES, a reminder to all listers NOT
to FASH (worry) theirselves over SPELLING, which is quite a MODERN snare and
distraction! (Burn being a stream, the toponym is hard to pin down as any
sign of blood kin. Compare the 20 or so Unrelated Shak[e]spe[a]re families
in 17th-century Warwickshire alone ;=))
Here are some of my NEW YEAR NABOKOVIAN RESOLUTIONS:
1. Re-read Pale Fire in the light of all the marvelously inventive
allusion-hunting from Matt, Brian, Dieter, Jansy, Priscilla et al.
And esp. Matt¹s helpful taxonomy of VN¹s allusions. AIM: decide if VN is a
greater poet than JS!
(My copy of Verses & Versions has just arrived from amazon.com. Using a US
credit-card, my bill was only $26.40 (NOT $40 as advertised) plus $7.98
postage to UK. Thanks to Stanislav Shvabrin for this money-saving tip.)
2. Re-review Priscilla Meyer¹s Grand Unified Theorem linking Lolita and
Onegin (Thesis: America & Russia) with Lolita and Pale Fire (Antithesis:
America & England) leading to the Hegelian Synthesis in Ada. ASK: does her
confusion over Angus and Hugh MacDiarmid dilute her conclusions &/or falsify
her methodology? Are we really supposed to gain insights into the evolutions
of European languages/literatures? Are we really expected to learn new
biographical facts about VN¹s linguistic/cultural odysseys?
Both suggestions seem counter to VN¹s opposition to the ³novel as vocational
text book.²
On 04/01/2009 22:06, "Nabokv-L" <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
>
>
> Subject:
> Re: [NABOKV-L] McDiarmid, Southey, etc.
> From:
> Stan Kelly <skb@bootle.biz> <mailto:skb@bootle.biz>
> Date:
> Thu, 1 Jan 2009 14:00:25 +0000
> To:
> Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> <mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
>
>
> But Tim, there's no lack of SCOTS OOT type dictionaries
> available for Sassenacks ootside Hibernia
> skb
>> On 30 Dec 2008, at 15:31, NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU>
>> <mailto:NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU> wrote:
>> Dear All,
>> As a native speaker of the so-called "Lallans", born in Ayrshire, may
>> I remind Nabokophiles that the young VN had a Scots tutor, Mr Burness.
>> He may have been related to Robert Burness (later Burns), the poet of my
>> native Mauchline, where great aunt Poosie and her husband Wullie Gibson
>> were the proprietors of Poosie Nansie's Howff, the setting of Burns's
>> Jolly Beggars Cantata. I speculate that Mr Burness (who turns up in
>> Pale Fire under another name) introduced the young VN to certain
>> Lowland Scots expressions. It is unlikely that VN would have
>> encountered such terms such as "houghmagandie" in Cambridge, Berlin,
>> Paris, Stanford, Wellesley or Cornell.
>>
>> Seasonally, lang may yer lum reek...
>>
>> Tom Rymour
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/